These days, I hear the same concern from a lot of my clients: How do you ensure your blog posts are supporting your SEO without making them sound like keyword-stuffed robo-drivel? It’s a fair question—and a chief reason SEO is the bane of so many marketers’ existence. While search engine optimization is a critical piece of a content marketing strategy, the fact remains that your blog posts are written for the humans reading them—not the search engine that may or may not be indexing them. So, while it can be tempting to pick your top five keywords and shove them into your posts as frequently as you can—or, to put it less melodramatically, to prioritize SEO above all else when you’re writing content—that’s really not a great long-term strategy. It may get you up to the top of the search results quicker, but readers can spot keyword stuffing from a mile away, and if they click on your blog post only to discover you’re writing for the algorithm, they aren’t going to get a good first impression of your brand.
You’re better off writing for your human readers, while keeping SEO best practices in mind. That way, you’ll have a blog full of authentic, valuable content, and you’ll be making slow and steady progress up the rankings in Google search.
Here are five strategies for writing for people first and Google second.
Understand Your Audience
Before you start planning your blog posts—and certainly before you start researching keywords—you have to take the time to understand your target audience. What are their pain points, their interests, and their biggest questions? Tailoring your content to your ideal customers’ specific needs ensures you provide them with real value, which is the primary purpose of your blog anyway. (And if you know your readers like the back of your hand, you’ll have a better sense of what phrases they’re using to seek answers to their most pressing questions, and you’ll have a much easier time incorporating them naturally into your content.)
Create High-Quality Content
We’ve all been guilty of throwing a blog post together and slapping onto our websites because we know the algorithms want to see regularly updated content. But we also know better. Creating quality content—content that’s informative, comprehensive, and well-written—is what builds trust with readers, keeps them coming back for more, and ultimately supports a purchase decision.
High-quality content also supports search rankings. How can Google tell if your content is high quality? SEO is supported by metrics like longer time on page and lower bounce rates. Both of those come from content that keep readers invested in your site, rather than moving on after a quick glance.
Get Smart About Keywords…
Finding the right keywords is a bit of a Goldilocks endeavor. Too general and you’re never going to beat the competition to the top of the search results; to narrow and, though you may be the top hit, nobody’s really searching for the keyword.
Take my business, for example—the editing arm. “Book editor” is an accurate search term, but there are so many book editors out there that I don’t have a great shot at ranking on that. “Female freelance book editor in East Austin, Texas,” on the other hand, is too narrow. Sure, there are a lot fewer editors that meet that description, so ranking for that term would be much easier. But how many people are searching quite so specifically? Not many. “Book editor in Austin” or “Austin Book Editor” hit that sweet spot in the middle.
You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to help you identify high-impact keywords in that Goldilocks zone, but remember: even if the data says it’s the perfect keyword, the number-one criteria for any word or phrase you’re trying to optimize on should be whether it can help you answer your readers’ pressing questions.
…but Don’t Show Them Off
And in that vein, you must, must, must make sure you can incorporate your keywords naturally into your high-quality, reader-centric content. Keyword stuffing is a huge turnoff for readers. It’s annoying to spot the overused phrases, and it’s even more annoying when they’re clearly shoehorned in for rankings, grammar be damned. So, sure, keep those keywords in mind as you write, but use them sparingly, and don’t be afraid of synonyms or semantic variations that make them fit more naturally into your prose. Besides, Google’s search algorithm has gotten wise to keyword stuffing over the years, and if it recognizes spammy techniques like that on your site, it’ll penalize you in the search results.
Note: This goes for your post titles, too. Titles and subheads both have more SEO weight than main text, so including keywords when you can is a smart idea. But when your title is just a stack of keywords that doesn’t give a clear or accurate idea of what the post is about, you’re misleading your readers, and they're not going to buy from a brand they feel is deceptive.
Focus on Readability
You know how much information customers are inundated with on a daily basis, because you are, too. Prioritizing readability will make it more likely that your audience will actually read what you’re working so hard to create. This means using clear and concise language, breaking up long paragraphs, and adding subheads (with keywords when appropriate) to indicate new topics or ideas. Bullet points, numbered lists, and visuals (with clear and specific alt text for both accessibility and SEO) can also make a post more readable.
I tell clients that, when they’re writing for the web, they need to think of formatting more like Buzzfeed and less like the New Yorker. Let me be clear: this doesn’t mean you need to be limiting yourself to frothy listicles and superficial content. It does mean that you need to think about how you feel when you’re in the middle of a busy day, looking for answers to important questions, and you’re hit with a wall of text versus a piece that’s formatted to be a little easier on the eyes. Besides making life easier for your audience, all of this formatting effort will contribute to your SEO efforts, as well.
As tempting as it can be to “write for the algorithm,” writing for the real people in your audience is always going to yield better results—in terms of both customer acquisition and SEO rankings. Your number-one priority in creating and distributing content should always be to provide value to your target audience. If you’re doing that consistently and effectively, the rankings will come. (And if you’d like some help, I would love to talk! Check out my content marketing services here, and contact me to talk more about how I can support your brand’s authentic, customer-first content creation efforts.)